Concordant Individualists

It has not been a week since the repressive law against tobacco
came into force in Spain [see this article]
as I write this. So far, the biggest protests that I have seen, in
television surveys and Letters to the Editor, have strangely been by
non-smokers who have judged the law as insufficient and even against
their interests. They find it terrible, for example, that bars and
restaurants of less than 100 square meters have the freedom to choose
to be smoking or non-smoking, because they have discovered that many
of them have chosen to allow smoking. These non-smokers, who think it
right and just that smokers have to go out into the bad weather to
enjoy their fags, are not willing in exchange to have breakfast in
the fresh air if there is not a single café or bar with “clean
air” in their district, and try to oblige some bars to forgo
the option to decide their own policy. The few non-smokers who are
briefly happy with the state of affairs don't celebrate their well
being, but curiously say things like, “prohibition is good”
or “it was time that someone stopped people smoking”,
betraying the fact that smoking in their presence didn't annoy them
so much as the abstract idea of smoking.

One thing that is deeply rooted in the
world (and particularly in Spain) and is an abomination is
evangelism. For me it is, without doubt, the principle cause of war,
oppression, fanaticism, why religions are often intolerant,
nationalism, dictatorship, terrorism, tyranny and almost all hateful
things. In Spain it is so deep-rooted, in its various forms, that I
sometimes think that it is not so unusual that we have had a few
civil wars, but rather that we are not in a permanent state of civil
war. This must be partly due to that fact that from time to time some
group wins over the others and imposes its laws, prohibitions and
ideas on everyone else for years at a stretch. It has now been thirty
years since the death of Franco, the last one who succeeded in
imposing his will on everyone, and we have been enjoying tolerance,
and sometimes taking it to ridiculous and wrong-headed extremes: the
citizens who claim that “all opposition is respectable”
when it is obviously not; take the burning of beggars [reference to a
recent horrific crime where a vagrant was burned alive while
sheltering the night in a ATM antechamber of a bank] or trying to
expel all immigrants from the country as examples. The concept of
tolerance is almost unknown in Spain. The typical Spaniard is
evangelist by nature and tends to think that no-one should do
anything that he doesn't want to do, that everyone should believe
what he believes and that no-one has any rights that might result in
any harm to him. He still doesn't distinguish between possibility and
obligation. He is the type who considers the possibility of divorce
as a threat to his own marriage and to Marriage in the abstract; or
the possibility that a homosexual couple should marry as a threat
against his own family and The Family; that people should continue to
smoke as a danger to his health and to Health in general; that
someone drinks as being a general encouragement to alcoholism; that
someone plays a game of chance as a certain road to collective
gambling, idleness and ruin; that someone pays a prostitute as an
exploitation of all women and so on ad infinitum. He forgets that no
one is forcing him to divorce his wife, marry his male neighbour, to
smoke, to drink, to gamble or go whoring. The typical Spaniard still
thinks that what he doesn't want for himself should not exist for
anyone else; what appears to him to be immoral or a “sin”
should be uprooted from society; if he is a Catalan or Basque
nationalist, then those who don't share his passion shouldn't have
the right to be called Catalan or Basque; or of course if he is a
Spanish nationalist then those who don't feel themselves to be
Spanish, or who don't want to be Spanish, should be forced to be
Spanish.

The typical Spaniard never limits
himself to holding his own beliefs, practising his own religion,
keeping up his own habits, thinking his own empty ideas and
abstaining from what he regards as “vices”... quietly and
without trying to persuade anyone to travel the same road. It has
always been said that the Spaniard is an individualist and rarely
does he unite with his colleagues in any collective action. Perhaps
it is true that we don't unite freely and voluntarily, but it is not
true that we all live in isolation, doing what we feel like doing and
without interfering in what others choose to do. The longing of the
typical Spaniard is that everyone, more than uniting with him,
imitates him, either by free will or by force. If this wasn't a
contradiction in terms one could say that the aspiration of the
typical Spaniard is a strange, prohibitionist and dictatorial country
of concordant individualists.

[Translator's note: The article paints a grim picture of Spaniards, BUT this attitude is not unique to Spain. It is prevalent all over the world. The message is relevant to all societies. (Javier Marias for Technorati which cannot search for words with accents).
]